U.S. stocks slid Monday as investors grappled with concerns about companies' earnings power after the U.S. bank Wachovia and the Dutch conglomerate Royal Philips Electronics posted disappointing quarterly results. But a surprise gain in March retail sales helped calm nerves.

As drivers have snapped up millions of the satellite-reading devices for their cars, the surge in interest has attracted new and bigger players into what had been a rather isolated market. Now Garmin could need one of its GPS units just to keep from getting lost.

Royal Philips Electronics is getting into the healthcare business. It is part of CEO Gerard Kleisterlee's plan to keep Philips profitable as many of its core markets mature. He wants to reduce Philips' dependence on electronics and increase its share of the health care market.

Could television viewers one day be forced to watch commercials with a system that prevents channel switching? Royal Philips Electronics have created a technology that could let broadcasters freeze a channel during a commercial, so viewers wouldn't be able to avoid it.

The text on Sony's new Librie electronic book reader doesn't quite equal ink on a page in clarity, but it comes remarkably close. The Librie is the first major consumer product to feature a long-in-the-works display technology that is designed to replace printed words on paper so-called electronic ink.

The gizmo-packed exhibition hall at the Society for Information Display's international symposium offers a tantalizing vision of what's to come. This week's meeting was all about extremes monitors that are very big or very small, very thin, very light and very, very high-resolution. Another big focus: making the cutting-edge technology very low cost.

Not only are the latest gadgets packed with more features than ever, they're also harder than ever to figure out. Culprits span the gizmo gamut from DVD players to digital cameras and wireless devices. Even televisions are increasingly acting more like computers, those notoriously confounding beasts.